Eating breakfast sharply boosted grades, graduation and led to fewer absences and suspensions, finds a wide-ranging Toronto District School Board study. It bolsters Ontario school boards’ call for a national nutrition program.

Cassandra Beals, Shanique Pierre and Harleen Rehill, students at Emery Collegiate Institute, pack snacks like bagels, cheese strings, apples and juice to be delivered to classrooms as part of Toronto's breakfast program.

By:Kristin RushowyEducation Reporter, Published on Fri May 11 2012

Eating breakfast boosts behaviour, grades and graduation rates while curbing suspensions and sick days, an extensive Toronto District School Board study has found.

“What we found was quite statistically stunning,” said Catherine Parsonage of the Toronto Foundation for Student Success, a charitable arm of the Toronto public board that worked with the board on the study.

“Children who don’t eat breakfast are twice as likely to be struggling in reading, twice as likely to be struggling in science,” Parsonage said.

But the study of 6,000 students at seven middle and high schools in the city’s needy northwest end found that when they are provided with a morning meal daily:

• 78 per cent of teens were set to graduate, compared to 61 per cent who only ate breakfast a few days or not at all.

• The number of suspensions dropped in half to 3 per cent, compared to 6 per cent, and absenteeism also went down.

• Students in Grades 7 and 8 scored 10 per cent higher in reading levels than those who skipped breakfast.

• The number of students considered “at-risk” in science dropped to 28 per cent, compared to 44 per cent among those who didn’t eat in the morning.

Across the Toronto District School Board, an estimated 40 per cent of students come to school hungry each morning. Among students involved in the study, that rate was initially 68 per cent.

Parsonage said the study, which she called the first of its kind in Canada, comes as Ontario school boards and a handful of politicians are pushing for a national nutrition program for kids. They argue that Canada is the only developed country without a national program

In Toronto, the foundation has been running a breakfast program for school kids since 1999. It now helps about 140,000 students.

Dr. Kirsty Duncan, the Liberal MP for Etobicoke North, has put forward a motion for Ottawa to start something along the lines of the Toronto breakfast program “so that every child gets the healthy start each morning that they need to help enhance both their learning opportunities in school and their personal health.”

The Ontario Public School Boards’ Association is asking the Canadian School Boards’ Association to lobby the federal government for a nutrition program.

“The only way that we are going to have a successful national nutrition program is if we get ministers of education in every province on side,” said Catherine Fife, the association’s president.

That likely won’t be a problem, she added, “but we may have trouble getting the federal government on side.”

Students who took part in the two-year Toronto study were fed a whole-grain product (bread, muffin or bagel), fruit or vegetable and protein (like cheese or yogurt) and milk each day. Beside academic improvements, they reported being healthier as well.

After the first year, teachers and principals started anecdotally reporting improved behaviour and focus in the classroom

“Now we have definitive proof,” Parsonage said, “that if we nourish children, they will do better in core subjects — reading, math and science — and we know that, in high school, 86 per cent of kids eating breakfast every day are on track to graduate.”

She called that particularly noteworthy, given challenges faced by many families.

The study also found that conflict resolution, problem-solving and class participation was up between 11 to 16 per cent for the kids in the study.

“A bagel will not teach an algebraic equation, but what it does allow is kids to take advantage of the excellent teaching in their classroom. Hungry kids can’t learn,” Parsonage said.

It takes about $9 million a year to run the Toronto Foundation for Student Success’s breakfast programs, which cost roughly $1 per student per day. A quarter is covered by governments, the rest through fundraising and charitable donations to the foundation.

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